The customer experience blog

Last week I chaired day two of the European Conference on Customer Management in London. There are always hundreds of memorable learning points flying around at an event that features the likes of Stephen Covey, Richard Branson, Ken Blanchard, Dan Pink and Fred Reichheld. But, one Uber learning point stood out for me. I was chatting with Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering and we agreed that there was a common thread that ran through many of the key-note presentations.

It is this: belief shapes our reality. The models or frameworks we use to conceptualise our organization, employees, and customers, are like a lens or filter through which we see the world. That filter determines our behaviours towards colleagues and customers, shaping our actions and therefore the results we achieve and how we keep score.

Let me explain: There was some argument at ECMW 2008 over the now popular Net Promoter Score (Satmetrix and Fred Reichheld's loyalty measurement system. NPS measures customers who are 'Promoters' minus those who are 'Detractors'). The godfather of loyalty, Fred Reichheld, argued its case on day one of the event and previously argued that 'It is the one number you need to grow.' In other words, the NPS can replace most other customer measures in business.

The next day, Timothy Keiningham of IPSOS MORI (a competitor in the marketplace, it must be said) berated the audience for believing NPS works, claiming aggressively that all those who believed in it were deluded by flawed research. Of course, a cynic might argue that a research company like IPSOS MORI agreeing that there is only one number that you really need to measure is a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Shared belief creates common purpose

But, Keiningham was missing the point, it seemed to me. A shared belief, when harnessed as a common purpose, creates powerful alignment, focus and a common direction of travel, which delivers momentum. So if we BELIEVE that NPS is in fact the one number we need to grow, then all our efforts will be devoted to customer advocacy and this is what we will get. That is exactly what Enterprise Rent-a-car focused on and that is exactly what they got.

If we believe, as Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) does, that leadership happens at all levels, then the way we lead will create a culture that fosters that. If we believe that innovation and a healthy disregard of traditional business practices is not just legitimate or allowable, but actually a competitive advantage and the best way to run a company, as Branson does, then that will become the nature of the brand, manifesting itself in the way its people behave and in the other Virgin brand attributes, from innovative customer experiences to cheeky advertising.

Transactional leaders

Similarly, most executives are 'transactional leaders'. They believe employees are hired labour and see their relationship as a transactional arrangement at best with little loyalty on either side. Transactional leadership tends to deliver compliance but not commitment. If you want people to stay you have to bribe them through increased pay and perks. By contrast, Robert Stephens, founder of The Geek Squad, who was speaking at the conference, believes that a company today is like a social network that has 'temporary custody of talent', and that you have to build in social links to help unite that talent around a common purpose. In other words you have to create an environment of learning and fun if you want people to stay with you.

In Robert's view, it is absolutely fine if your people leave to advance themselves, but not for any other reason. He also believes that 'recruitment is the most authentic form of advertising' and so goes out of his way not to 'sell' the Geek Squad to candidates but to tell it like it is as part of the recruitment process - the need for dedication, devotion to duty, hard work and obsessive attention to speed and quality.

If we look at how market places evolve and companies compete over time, the centrality of belief in shaping reality becomes clear. A good example is MP3 players. If you believe that they are purely functional, then that is how you will compete and your culture will mirror that, focusing on costs and features primarily. You will tend to manage by the numbers.

How markets evolve


If you believe that you can add value through service, as Apple did with iTunes, then marketing assumes greater importance and brand loyalty and market share will be your focus. If you believe that customer experience is the greatest differentiator, as I do, and Robert Stephens does, then the culture you need is likely to be more engaging and emotional (EQ rather than IQ) and experiential itself. In this case measuring the customer and the employee experience become the dominant focus. This is where Apple is heading with its retail stores.


Our structures create us

So, the key thing for me is this: if a company wants to compete on the basis of customer experience then it first has to create a culture that values engagement & emotional intelligence; one that invests primarily in people and their development.

Form follows function, as the designers and engineers like to say. Or as Winston Churchill said 'First we create our structures and then they create us.' So it is a waste of time trying to embrace customer experience if the culture or the belief systems of the leaders don't support it as a competitive strategy. This requires us to make our beliefs explicit and ensure they are aligned with what we want to achieve. Otherwise we are likely to fail

So, if you want your investment in the customer experience to bear fruit, the 'one question' you have to start out with becomes: 'What do I believe in?'

Posted by
Shaun Smith
On behalf of
Smith+co

Is your sales process undermining your customer experience?

Do you remember a decade or so ago when focus switched from 'getting' customers (selling) to keeping them? Sales-led organizations the world over were struck in particular by Fred Reichheld's book The Loyalty Effect (1996) with his bath analogy; that being sales-led without a retention strategy was trying to fill the bath while the plug was out.

It has become clear in recent years that the dislocation between over-promising through sales and marketing to win new customers, and the actual customer experience that comes after, is a major contributor to customer dissatisfaction, defection and cynicism.

Smart customers tend to see the sales process as one of manipulation. And, as the Swedish economist Kjell Nordstrom likes to say, "There are no more dumb customers any more."

The days of old style, hard sell sales practices are having to change as a result. Dixons, the UK high street electrical retailer, found out the hard way that incentivising its sales assistants to sell extended warranty policies at all costs is incompatible with building a brand that consumers trust. In the short-term, up to fifty per cent of the company's profits came from the sale of extended warranties. But, the practice saw a consumer backlash and Dixons no longer exists on the UK high street.

In the business to business world, hard-nosed sales cultures use the term 'bait and switch' to describe the practice of wheeling in one team to win a contract and then replacing them with a much more junior team when the contract is won and the work starts.

In both the B2C and B2B examples, above, customers are disappointed because they feel the sales process is manipulative, fundamentally dishonest and not operating in their interests. Not the reaction you want from your customers if you want to create positive word of mouth referral.

It doesn't matter what techniques you use to disguise your selling. Savvy customers are wise to all of them. "Everyone today does relationship selling. Everyone does consultative selling," argue Terry R. Bacon and David G. Pugh in their book The Behavioural Advantage. "The selling process itself has become commoditized."

It's time to recognize selling for what it has to become - the buying experience part of your customer experience; the introduction and induction to your organisztion for new customers.

A number of forward-looking organizations are re-inventing their selling process from the ground up. In coming blog posts I will take a look at how they are doing this. For now, as part of this introduction to our series of occasional posts on re-inventing selling, I'll leave you with the six key areas you need to think about:

1. How the sales experience can be redesigned so that it becomes an integral part of the customer experience and dramatizes the power of your brand
2. How sales people are hired and more particularly, the spec that is used in hiring them
3. How sales organizations are structured and managed
4. How the sales effort is measured and how sales people are rewarded
5. How senior management works with (or doesn't work with) the sales team
6. How the sales team is integrated with the rest of the organization, to ensure customers receive a continuous experience rather than a disjointed one

John Aves
Smith+co